Black Rain

Years after the atomic bombing, Shigematsu Shizuma reconstructs from his diary the days after 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima, as he tries to clear his niece Yasuko, who was caught in the radioactive black rain, of the suspicion of illness that is ruining her marriage prospects. Ibuse maps the real catastrophe: the city on the morning of the bomb, the hypocenter and the ruined streets, the rivers of the Ota delta filled with the dead as the black rain falls, and the quiet country village where the survivors wait, years later, for sickness to declare itself.

Shigematsu

Hiroshima (the morning of the bomb)

6 August 1945

On an ordinary summer morning, going about his work in the city, Shigematsu sees the blinding flash and is flung down as the bomb destroys Hiroshima in an instant. From his diary of that day and the ones that follow, the novel builds a patient, almost documentary account of the unimaginable made suddenly, terribly real.

6 August 1945

explicit The book reconstructs the morning of 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima, the real city, when the atomic bomb was dropped; Shigematsu was in the city and set it down in the diary the novel draws on.

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